Walter O'Brien Quotes

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

When a culture is broken, the cracks show - morale is weakened, but so is profit and performance. That's why culture has to be at the core of any business transformation.

Any company faces big challenges during transformation. People are accustomed to going ahead on the existing track. Even when they know there are problems, the first reaction is to protect the old way.

If I can impact an executive and his or her team, I can help to change the culture of an organization.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

Life is like the monkey bars: you have to let go to move forward. Once you make the decision to leap into entrepreneurship, be sure to loosen your grasp on old concepts so you can swing your way to new ones.

I think everybody at IBM knows the early 1990s disaster, and it's in our fabric that you cannot miss the ship.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

If you look at any of the big companies, whether it is IBM or L'Oreal, they have a corporate religion and corporate self-image that makes it very difficult for them to execute in different areas.

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

Multiple mergers can be challenging because people come from different backgrounds.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

What is clear is that business leaders must commit to champion change - to be transparent about their goals for change, to align their incentives systems to drive the change, and to make sure their work environments are flexible in a way that allows men and women who choose to work to be able to achieve all of their potential.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it?

If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.

I've worked in the business world and, as a futurist, the whole 20 years that I've led at Mosaic.

Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.

By the time I stepped down as Xerox's CEO in 2009 - and as chairman in January 2010 - Xerox had become the vibrant, profitable and revitalized company that it still is today. What made the difference was a strong turnaround plan, dedicated people and a firm commitment from company leaders.